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The Congo Basin
The second great rainforest, and the peat beneath it
Only one rainforest on Earth is larger, and this one is still, on balance, absorbing more carbon than it releases. The Congo Basin is the great bowl of central Africa drained by the Congo River: about 3.7 million square kilometers straddling the equator across six countries, its heart a nearly unbroken canopy of hardwood and swamp. The river and the basin are not the same thing. The Congo is the artery; the basin is the body, and much of what makes the region globally important lies underfoot. Beneath the Cuvette Centrale swamps sits one of the largest tropical peatlands ever mapped, holding carbon equivalent to years of global fossil-fuel emissions in waterlogged, undisturbed ground.
The basin is a shallow saucer rimmed by highlands, and the Congo River crosses the equator twice as it drains it, so some part of the watershed is always in its rainy season and the flow stays remarkably steady year-round. The Democratic Republic of the Congo holds most of the forest, with the Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and the Central African Republic holding the rest. To the east the land climbs to the Rwenzori Mountains, where Margherita Peak reaches 5,109 meters, and to the volcanoes of the Virunga chain, among them the restless Nyiragongo above Goma. Forest elephants, bonobos, gorillas and okapi live here and almost nowhere else.
Bantu-speaking farmers spread through the basin over millennia, and the kingdoms of Kongo, Luba and Lunda traded copper, salt and cloth long before European ships arrived. King Leopold II of Belgium then claimed the region as private property, and the rubber regime that followed killed millions. Independence brought Mobutu, then two wars that drew in a half-dozen armies. Today perhaps 75 million people depend on the basin, most of them for firewood, bushmeat and shifting cultivation, while logging concessions and newly auctioned oil blocks press against the peatlands. Conservation funding rarely matches the scale of what is at stake here: a forest that quietly does more climate work than almost any other on the planet.